Women's language and men's language

Sometimes, there are very clear differences between the forms of
language typically used by women and those typically used by men.

For instance, here are a few of the many cases where Japanese men and
women traditionally use different lexical items to express the same meaning
(examples from Janet Shibamoto, The Womanly Woman, in Philips et
al., Eds., "Language, gender and sex in comparative perspective"):

Men's form

Women's form

Gloss

hara

onaka

stomach

tukemono

okookoo

pickles

mizu

ohiya

water

bentoo

obentoo

box lunch

kane

okane

money

hasi

ohasi

chopsticks

umai

oisii

delicious

kuu

taberu

eat

kutabaru/sinu

nakanaru

die

It is not an accident that all the traditionally "female" nouns have the
polite or honorific prefix /o-/; this is one of many ways in which
Japanese female speech has been characterized as being more polite than
male speech. These days, many younger Japanese women would no longer choose
to use the specific female forms.

Terminology: sex vs. gender

The different words traditionally used by Japanese men and women are obviously
not determined directly by their complement of chromosomes, or by the nature
of their reproductive organs, any more than the fact that all of them speak
Japanese rather English is. Such linguistic differences are part of a cultural
(re)construction of a biological difference -- a marking of gender differences
that appears to be dying out in Japanese culture, as the roles and attitudes
of men and women change.

The available terminology of ordinary English does not give us any easy
way make it clear -- if we want to -- whether we are talking about biological
or cultural differences. In recent years, many people have imposed this
distinction on the terms "sex" and "gender",
although in ordinary usage these terms overlap.

Here are some paired quotes from different recent newspaper stories,
in which uses of "gender" might easily have been replaced
by "sex," or vice versa:

The homeless were recorded by genderand
whether adult or child, but names were not taken.He declined to identify the surgeon , even by sex.

We unconditionally reject [birth control] as
a means of gender selection.In the new paradigm of sex determination
that is emerging, the fetus is roughly female to begin with.

She lifted one leg, saw the gender
of the baby, threw the leg down and said the baby was a boyThe 38-year-old Couric said the sex
of the baby hasn't been determined.

Here is another newspaper quote, where gender and sex
are used in adjacent sentences in apparently interchangeable senses:

Faulkner sued The Citadel two years ago for rescinding
its acceptance of her after learning her gender. She did
not identify her sex on the school 's enrollment application.

In The American Heritage dictionary, the definition of gender
starts with its grammatical senses, and then references the definition of
sex:

[gen-der] 1. Grammar. 1. a. A set of two or more categories,
as masculine, feminine, and neuter, into which words are divided according
to sex, animation, psychological associations, or some other characteristic,
and that determine agreement with or the selection of modifiers, referents,
or grammatical forms. 1. b. One category of such a
set. 1. c. The classification of a
word or grammatical form in such a category. 1. d. The distinguishing form
or forms used. 2. Classification of sex.

The definition of sex in the same dictionary starts from
the biological question of reproductive function, but extends to all associated
characteristics:

[sex] 1. a. The property or quality
by which organisms are classified according to their reproductive functions. 1. b. Either of two divisions,
designated male and female, of this classification. 2. Males or females collectively. 3. The condition or character
of being male or female; the physiological, functional, and psychological
differences that distinguish the male and the female. 4. The sexual urge or instinct
as it manifests itself in behavior. 5. Sexual intercourse. 6. The genitalia.

The dictionary definitions are consistent with the overlapping usage
seen in the newspaper quotes.

Nevertheless, as indicated earlier, in recent years many people have
decided to use this pair of terms to express the newly-salient distinction
between biological and cultural aspects of reproductive status. Roughly,
in this way of talking, sex is genetics and physiology,
while gender is culture and identity. From a recent medical
text:

Taken as a noun, sex is a biological determinant,
while gender carries psychological and sociological implications.
Hence in biological sciences, sex differences are innate, chromosomally
determined characteristics that distinguish between males and females,
while in psychological and sociological sciences gender differences refer
to male or female traits that result from learning and social roles.

Another quote, from a book entitled Gender Voices:

The opening words of Simone de Beauvoir's historic
book The Second Sex capture the essential characteristic of gender:
'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.' Gender is a socially rather
than a biologically constructed attribute -- people are not born with
but rather learn the behaviours and attitudes appropriate to their sex.
During the last decade of research, it has become clear that gender is
a very complex category. Theories are still be developed which try to
grapple with the complexity but they share the idea that gender, unlike
sex, is a continuous variable. A person can be more or less 'feminine'
and more or less 'masculine.' Furthermore, a man can display 'feminine'
characteristics just as a woman may demonstrate 'masculine' ones.

Although the terminology of sex vs. gender
is far from generally accepted or even understood, the distinction that
it expresses is a useful one, and so we will adopt it here.

Biology/sex/language

Men and women are differentiated biologically in two ways that seem directly
relevant to language. One has to do with the larynx, and the other with
the brain.

The larynx

Males and females differ little in stature before puberty, but post-pubescent
males are about 8-9% taller. According to a
database maintained by NIST, the male children in their sample averaged
about 3% taller at age 2, and less than 1% taller at age 10, whereas males
average about 9% taller at age 18. According to a 1977 publication from
the National Center for Health Statistics, at age 2 the 50th percentiles
for males and females are identical; at age 10, girls are .6% taller (in
the 50th percentile), and at age 18, males are about 8% taller.

With respect to the length of the vocal folds (the tissue in the larynx
that is responsible for producing voiced speech), this overall difference
between the sexes is magnified by approximately a factor of seven: the
vocal folds of post-pubescent males average about 50-60% longer than those
of females of the same age (length of the overall glottis or length of
the anterior glottis in the figure and table below)..

Top view of the vocal cords

AC

anterior commissure

VP

tip of vocal process

AnAC

angle of bilateral vocal folds at AC

GWP

glottic width at vocal process level

LEG

length of entire glottis

LAG

length of anterior glottis

LPG

length of posterior glottis

LMF

length of membranous vocal fold

Male

Female

Ratio M/F

AnAC in degrees

16

25

LMF in mm

15.4

9.8

1.57

GWP in mm

4.3

4.2

1.02

LAG in mm

15.1

9.5

1.59

LPG in mm

9.5

6.8

1.40

LEG in mm

24.5

16.3

1.50

(Data and picture from Hirano, M, K Sato
and K Yukizane; "Male-female difference in anterior commisure angle",
in S. Kiritani, H. Hirose and H. Fujisaki, Eds., Speech Production
and Language, Mouton de Gruyter, 1997. The study involved excised
larynges from 10 males and 10 females, average age 58 for the males
and 66 for the females)

As a result of these laryngeal changes, adult human males have significantly
lower voices than females do, out of proportion to their rather small
different in average height. Though the pitch of anyone's speech depends
very much on circumstances, under comparable conditions, (adult) human
females voices are likely to show pitches roughly 75% higher those of
male voices. This difference reflects not only the difference in vocal
cord length, but also a difference in vocal cord mass -- and perhaps some
socially-conditioned factors as well. A graph showing data from various
studies is reproduced below (taken from Kent 1994):

Because the larynx also drops lower in the neck in post-pubescent males,
the overall adult male vocal tract length is about 15% longer on average.
This means that resonance frequences (including the formant frequencies
that determine vowel quality) are also about 15% lower in adult males
as compared to females. This is about 175% of the difference expected
on the basis of the average overall size differences (8-9%). This difference
also means that adult males are even more subject to the risk of choking
on aspirated food that is a price the human species pays for adapting
its vocal organs to speech.

None of the other species of apes shows a similar sexual dimorphism of
the vocal organs, although overall size differences between the sexes
tend to be larger in other apes than in homo sapiens.

Brain anatomy and physiology

There is only one well-documented difference in neuroanatomy between
human males and females, concerning the corpus
callosum, an array of neural fibers that connects the two hemispheres
of the cortex.. According to a series of studies (reviewed in Holloway
et al. 1993), the corpus callosum of females is on average larger
when adjusted for total brain size, especially in the posterior portion
known as the splenium. Brain size tends to track body size, and so male
brains are on average larger. The average size of the corpus callosum
in adult females is apparently roughly the same as in males, but
it is larger in proportion to total brain size. Some researchers have
argued that the differences are not so much in size but in three-dimensional
tissue distribution, with the female splenium more bulbous and thus more
concentrated in the midline, where section areas may be most easily compared.

The sexual dimorphism of the corpus callosum is said to contrast with
other aspects of brain anatomy, where average sizes, corrected for overall
brain size, show no significant differences between males and females.
The corpus callosum does not appear to be dimorphic in monkeys and prosimians,
while evidence from apes is uncertain.

Such differences suggest that interhemispheric communication may differ
between the sexes. Speech and language tend to be localized on the left,
or dominant, side of the brain ("lateralized"), while some other
functions such as visuospatial integration and emotional appreciation
of context are lateralized on the opposite side.

Several functional studies have found sex differences in cerebral lateralization
for language-related activities. Perhaps the most striking differences
appear in some studies of early development. A more recent study has found
an adult difference in degree of lateralization of (at least certain kinds
of) phonological processing. Finally, there are some suggestive differences
in patterns of disability following stroke. However, it needs to be stressed
that in what is known about neurophysiology, just as for neuroanatomy,
there is a great deal of individual variation, and the overall similarities
between the sexes are much greater than the differences.

Developmental studies of cerebral lateralization

A pair of developmental studies apear to show large and striking differences
in lateralization of language-related functions between male and female
infants at three and six months of age. The information in this section
comes from D. W. Shucard et al., Electrophysiological activity in infancy,
in Philips, Steele and Tanz, Eds., Language gender and sex in comparative
perspective, 1987.

The studies used measurements of Auditory Evoked Potentials (AEP). In
the AEP technique, recordings are made from scalp electrodes. The intensity
of the recorded signal depends on the amount of activity in the neural
tissues in the brain region near the electrode location. When a sudden
sound, typically a beep-like "tone pip," is heard, there is a corresponding
burst of AEP over a period of a second or so.

In these studies, tone pips were presented in pairs; each tone was a
tenth of a second long, and the tones in each pair were two seconds apart.
The tones were presented in three conditions, called music, verbal and
baseline. In the music condition, classical music was played as a background.
In the verbal condition, the background was passages from a second-grade
reader, read by a female voice. In the baseline condition, the background
was a white-noise hiss.

In the studies being discussed, what matters is the difference between
the signal recorded on the right side of the head and the signal recorded
on the left side of the head. The figure below shows the AEP recordings
for one presentation of a pair of tones to a 3-month-old male infant in
the "verbal" condition:

You can see that the signals from the left-side electrodes (especially
the extrema labelled N2 and P3) are systematically smaller than the signals
from the right-side electrodes.

As the graph below indicates, this pattern is quite regular for the male
3-month-olds in all conditions -- the right-side electrodes show higher
activity regardless of the background condition. For the female three-month-olds,
the situation is reversed -- they show higher activity in the left-side
electrodes, regardless of conditions.

When infants are tested at the age of six months, the situation is different.
The male six-month-olds still show the same pattern of greater right-side
response regardless of background condition. The female six-month-olds
show no significant lateralization for the baseline condition, and show
the verbal condition with more activity on the left side, while the music
condition shows more activity on the right side. This is the pattern expected
for adult subjects.

Thus the infants at three months show opposite condition-independent lateralization,
while at six months, the female infants seem to have developed the adult
pattern, while the males are still showing the same immature pattern as
at three months.

We should mention in passing that other studies have shown that human
infants have some phonetic perception abilities essentially from birth,
a matter that we will return to later in the lecture on child language
acquisition.

No one knows what these infant AEP differences mean -- beyond the fact
that there are apparently some real sex differences in developmental lateralization
of brain function. These sex/language differences in 3- and 6-month-old
infants are much larger than anything that can be measured in adults.

Evidence from fMRI studies

A 1995
study by Shaywitz et al., using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), found that in phonological tasks (rhyme detection),

in males, brain activation is localized to left
inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) regions; in females the pattern of activation
is very different, engaging more diffuse neural systems involving both
left and right IFG regions.

In other words, (this particular type of) phonological processing was
more strongly lateralized in males than in females. It should be noted
that a variety of other language-related tasks in this (and other) studies
did not show sex-linked differences in localization of activation.

Evidence from aphasia

Evidence for language-related functional differences in neuroanatomy
between adult males and females is offered by a series of studies by Doreen
Kimura and colleagues (Kimura 1993, Kumura and Hampson 1994), which
show that in patients suffering damage to the left hemisphere of the brain,
more men (48.5%) than women (30%) show signs of aphasia (impairment in
speech or language skills). Looking at the details of correlations between
damage location and type of impairment, Kimura further finds that when
the left anterior portion of the frontal cortex is damaged, somewhat more
women than men suffer aphasia. When the the left posterior portion of
the frontal cortex is damaged, more men than women suffer aphasia.

We will return to questions of this kind in the lecture on Neurology
and Pathology of Language. For the moment, the only thing that matters
about Kimura's findings is that they appear show some differences between
men and women in functional localization of language skills in the brain.
However, some other researchers have called the conclusions into question,
since the men and women in the study also differed in typical size of
brain lesions.

Functional differences

No one knows why the sex difference in the human corpus callosum exists,
if indeed it has any function. Nor does anyone really know why human larynx
size and position differ between the sexes.

Evolutionary theorists usually assume that sexual dimorphism arises as
a result of within-species reproductive competition, part of what is known
as "sexual selection". This is a plausible account in the case
of larynx size and position -- a deeper voice, sounding like it comes
from a larger person, might have been helpful to paleolithic males in
impressing potential mates or intimidating potential rivals. It is less
clear that there is any story of this kind about the differences in brain
anatomy and physiology.

It is tempting to speculate that the brain differences are somehow
connected to the hypothetical division of labor on the Pleistocene plains.
Perhaps there was an evolutionary pressure for greater communicative abilities
among women, or better integration of language functions with other kinds
of processing. Alternatively, since some visuospatial functions are localized
in the non-dominant hemisphere, and males tend to perform better than
females on tasks such as visualization of object rotation, greater lateralization
of male brains might have something to do with development of hunting-related
skills like long-distance navigation and projectile aiming. However, other
research shows that females in fact excel in other spatial skills,
involving learning and remembering where things are. At present, all stories
about a functional-evolutionary basis for the language lateralization
differences between the sexes are speculative at best.

A recent news release from the Educational Testing Service reiterates
the general finding that females tend to score somewhat higher than males
on language-related tests:

A profile based on nationally representative samples
of 12th graders shows that for many categories of tests (ranging from
reading to math to natural science), average differences in the performance
of females and males were very small. Writing and language use stood out
as areas in which females scored higher than males. The largest difference
favoring males was on mechanical/electronic tests.

The study indicated that among all girls and
boys nationally, the familiar gap in math and science is about one-quarter
of what it was in 1960. However, differences persist among very high
achieving students. Over the same 30-year period, boys have not closed
the gap in writing.

It is important to keep in mind, while considering these issues, that
the average differences in these various skills between men and women
are fairly small, and that there is a great deal of variation among individuals
of either sex. To the extent that there are systematic differences in
language usage between men and women, we must apparently look elsewhere
for an explanation than in the anatomy and physiology of their brains.

Culture/gender/language

When we look at the linguistic behavior of men and women across languages,
cultures and circumstances, we will find many specific differences.

Quite a few languages show lexical and morphological differences like
those exemplified above for Japanese. In some Native American languages,
grammatical forms of verbs are inflected differently according to the
sex of the speaker. Examples from the Muskogean language Koasati are given
below:

Women's form

Men's form

English gloss

lakaw

lakaws

he is lifting it

lakawwitak

lakawwitaks

let me lift it

mol

mols

he is peeling it

i:p

i:ps

he is eating it

tacilw

tacilws

you are singing

However, explicit and categorical grammatical and or even lexical marking
of speaker gender is not the norm. Instead, we usually find differences
in the frequency of certain things (words, or pronunciations, or constructions,
or intonations, or whatever), especially when the circumstances of utterance
are taken into account. This has been explained by Trudgill as follows:

Linguistic sex varieties arise because ... language
... is closely related to social attitudes. Men and women are socially
different in that society lays down different social roles for them and
expects different behaviour patterns from them. Language simply reflects
this social fact.... What is more, it seems that the larger and more inflexible
the differences between the social roles of men and women in a particular
community, the larger and more rigid the linguistic differences tend to
be. ... Our English examples have all consisted of tendencies ... The
examples of distinct male and female varieties all come from ... communities
where sex roles are much more clearly delineated.

It has often been observed that (other things equal) female speech tends
to be evaluated as more "correct" or more "prestigious", less slangy, etc.
Men are more likely than women to use socially-stigmatized forms (like
"ain't" or g-dropping in English). On the other hand, women are usually
in the lead in changes in pronunciation, typically producing new pronunciations
sooner, more often, and in more extreme ways than men.

A number of stylistic differences between female and male speech have
been observed or claimed. Women's speech has been said to be more polite,
more redundant, more formal, more clearly pronounced, and more elaborated
or complex, while men's speech is less polite, more elliptical, more informal,
less clearly pronounced, and simpler.

In terms of conversational patterns, it has been observed or claimed
that women use more verbal "support indicators" (like mm-hmm) than
men do; that men interrupt women more than than they interrupt other men,
and more than women interrupt either men or other women; that women express
uncertainty and hesitancy more than men; and that (at least in single-sex
interactions) males are more likely to give direct orders than females
are.

For nearly all of these issues of stylistic and conversational differences,
there are some contradictory findings, and it seems that one must look
closely at the nature of the circumstances in order to predict how men
and women will behave verbally.

Nevertheless, it is clear that in many circumstances, women and
men tend to use language differently.

Within the domain of culture, two broad classes of explanations
for such gender effects have been offered: difference theories
and dominance theories.

According to difference theories (sometimes called two-culture
theories), men and women inhabit different cultural (and therefore
linguistic) worlds. To quote from the preface to Deborah Tannen's 1990
popularization You just don't understand, "boys and girls grow
up in what are essentially different cultures, so talk between women and
men is cross-cultural communication."

According to dominance theories, men and women inhabit
the same cultural and linguistic world, in which power and status are
distributed unequally, and are expressed by linguistic as well as other
cultural markers. In principle, women and men have access to the same
set of linguistic and conversational devices, and use them for the same
purposes. Apparent differences in usage reflect differences in status
and in goals.

The general consensus is that both sorts of explanations are appropriate
to some degree, but the discussion is sometimes acrimonious and political.
For instance, Tannen has been criticized by some feminist writers as a
"deeply reactionary" "apologist for men", who "repeatedly excuses their
insensitivities in her examples and justifies their outright rudeness
as merely being part of their need for independence." Those who criticize
Tannen in this way argue that the behavior of the men in her examples
reflects a desire for domination rather rather than a different set of
cultural norms.

What about the other genders?

Discussions of male and female speech and language, whether construed as
biological or cultural or both, leaves out the fact that human sexuality
is not nearly as binary as the basic opposition between XX and XY chromosomal
complements. As discussed above, this has been one of the motivations for
introducing the term gender, since gender characteristics
may be present to varying degrees across individuals, or for a particular
individual across occasions.

An interesting analogy between sexuality and language is suggested in
the following quote from a book review in the October, 1997 issue of Scientific
American, written by anthropologists Tom Boellstorff and Lawrence
Cohen:

... humans have biological potentials that take a
completed shape under specific personal and social circumstances ...we
would argue that H. sapiens sapiens has evolved so that we have
no sexual orientation without reference to a particular, historically
located culture, just as we have no way of speaking without using a particular,
historically located language.

There has been considerable interest in gay
and lesbian language. In particular, the speech of gay males is stereotypically
marked, and there have been some attempts to find out what sorts of gay-specific
speech varieties really exist, for which particular groups and circumstances.
The detailed linguistic characteristics of marked varieties of gay male
speech, and their relationship to actual or stereotypical female speech
varieties, remain largely unexplored by scientists, though they are extensively
exploited by comedians.

Pop psychology

Over the past decade, public awareness and interest in the topic of language
and gender has grown enormously, mostly focused on some popular and effective
presentations of the two-cultures theory. Though both critical and scientific
response to these works have been mixed at best, they have sold millions
of copies, and been extremely influential in forming popular opinions on
the subject.

The first and most important of these was Deborah Tannen's 1990 work
You
just don't understand. Opposed reader reviews from www.amazon.com:

This book changed the way I look at the world.
It is truly a tool for life and probably the single most important book
I have every read.

Whining misrepresentation. Tannen represents
herself as an objective linguist but does little more than rail against
men and make a biased, self-serving case for women. Thankfully, most
women with whom I've discussed her work see through it and its reductive
claims about report talk (men) vs. rapport talk (women).

Another work in this genre is John Gray, Men are from Mars, women
are from Venus. More reader reviews from www.amazon.com:

This is good - men and women do not speak the
same language. I have always known this but was unable to articulate
it as well as John Gray. We read pieces of it to each other, laughing
and giggling we say "yes, that is how you behave" and "now I know why
you act that way".

Absolute twaddle. Gray is a charlatan at best,
a caveman at worst. This take on gender relations is insulting to men,
women, and aliens.

The idea of gender differences in communication style has given rise
to a new genre of joke -- what do women -- or men -- really mean?

These ideas formed the basis of a running gag in the 1992 movie White
Men Can't Jump. Gloria (Rosie Perez) has been reading Tannen's book,
and tries the experiment of telling her boyfriend Billy (Woody Harrelson)
that she's thirsty. When he responds by getting her a glass of water,
she berates him for treating her statement as a request for him to solve
a problem -- allegedly the typical male response -- instead of expressing
sympathy for her thirst, which as a woman is what she (according to her
interpretation of Tannen) really wanted.

Research results or stereotypes?

What does the two-culture theory say? The basic ideas go back at least to
the early 1980's, beginning with John Gumperz's research on misunderstandings
in intercultural communication involving immigrants, and Marjorie Goodwin's
studies of conversational interaction among African-American children in
Philadelphia. The most influential recent exponent of the theory has been
Deborah Tannen.

In Tannen's version, women use language to achieve intimacy, resulting
in what she calls "rapport talk." For women, "talk is the glue that holds
relationships together," and so conversations are "negotiations for closeness
in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to
reach consensus." Men, on the other hand, use language to convey
information, resulting in what Tannen calls "report talk." Because men
maintain relationships through other activities, conversation for them
becomes a negotiation for status in which each participant attempts to
establish or improve his place in a hierarchical social order.

Is this true? Many people have criticized Tannen's ideas as social stereotypes,
based on overgeneralization of limited research findings, or on anecdotes.
For example, Alice Freed writes (in the Proceedings of the Second Berkeley
Women and Language Conference)

The anecdotal nature of much of the material that
Tannen provides emerges as still another area of weakness in her work.
She uses her stories as a basis for sweeping generalizations, claiming,
for example, that men but not women offer advice when others are seeking
what Tannen calls understanding and that men but not women provide unrequested
information in response to questions.

It is difficult to test the broadest generalizations offered -- those
about "rapport" vs. "report" for example -- but many more specific claims
can be and have been tested over the past 20 years or so of research.
Predicted differences are sometimes found but sometimes are not. Linguistic
behavior is influenced by many other factors-- age, class, ethnicity,
social setting, and individual personality -- and gender effects interact
with other factors in complex and interesting ways.

A case study: use of tag questions

Tag questions are grammatical structures in in which a declarative is
followed by an attached interrogative clause or 'tag', such as

You were missing last week, weren't you?

Thorpe's away, is he?

In her influential (1975) work Language and Women's Place, Robin
Lakoff depicted a typical female speech style, allegedly characterized
by the use of features such as hesitations, qualifiers, tag questions,
empty adjectives, and other properties, which she asserted to have a common
function: to weaken or mitigate the force of an utterance. Thus tag questions
"are associated with a desire for confirmation or approval which
signals a lack of self-confidence in the speaker."

Lakoff's description of female speech style was based on her remembered
impressions rather than on any systematic, quantitative observation. When
subsequent researchers went out and counted things, they often found it
difficult to confirm her observations. For instance, some studies found
that men actually used more tag questions than women did.

Thus Cameron et al. (1988) looked at tag questions in a 45,000 word sample
from a British corpus of transcribed conversations, called the "Survey
of English Usage" (SEU). There were nine sections of 5,000 words
each; three of all-male conversation, three of all-female conversation,
and three of mixed-sex conversation. In this corpus, there were 60 tag
questions used by men, and only 36 by women. This is a significant sex
difference, but in the opposite direction!

When they looked more closely at the function of the tag questions in
this corpus, a further sex difference appeared -- which on closer examination
seems not primarily to be a sex difference at all.

Holmes (1984) distinguishes two functions of tag questions: modal
vs. affective. Modal tags "request information or confirmation
of information of which the speaker is uncertain":

But you've been in Reading longer than that, haven't you?

Affective tags "are used not to signal uncertainty on the part of
the speaker, but to indicate concern for the addressee":

Open the door for me, could you?

His portraits are quite static by comparison, aren't they?

Affective tags are further subdivided into two kinds: softeners
like the first example above, which conventionally mitigate the force
of what would otherwise be an impolite demand, and facilitative
tags like the second example, which invite the listener to take a conversational
turn to comment on the speaker's assertion.

When the tag data in the SEU study are categorized in this way, it turns
out that in the category of modal tags -- that is, the tags that genuinely
express uncertainty -- are much more likely to be used by men, while the
affective tags are only somewhat more likely to be used by men:

Females

Males

Modal tags

9 (25%)

24 (40%)

Affective tags

27 (75%)

36 (60%)

Total tags

36

60

Suspecting that something besides sex/gender was involved here, the authors
of this study turned their attention to another corpus. This database
consisted of

nine hours' recorded unscripted talk from three
broadcast settings: a medical radio phone-in where the participant roles
were ... doctor and caller/client; classroom interaction recorded for
... educational TV, in which the salient roles were those of teacher
and pupil; and a general TV discussion programme, in which the roles
were ... presenter and audience.

In each case, one of the participants can be identified as "powerful"
-- "institutionally responsible for the conduct of the talk",
and typically also endowed with greater social power and status in the
context of the conversations -- doctor vs. patient, teacher vs. student.
The data was sampled so that men and women were equally represented in
the "powerful" and "powerless" roles. All tag questions
were identified and classified according to Holmes' categories. The results:

Women

Men

Powerful

Powerless

Powerful

Powerless

Modal tags

3 (5%)

9 (15%)

10 (18%)

16 (29%)

Affective tags (facilitative)

43 (70%)

0

25 (45%)

0

Affective tags (softeners)

6 (10%)

0

4 (7%)

0

Total tags

61

55

First, in this database -- unlike in the SEU data -- there is no significant
overall difference in tag usage between the sexes.

Second, men continue to use modal tags relatively more often, and affective
tags relatively less often.

The most striking difference by far, however, is not the sex/gender effect
but the power effect: it is only the people who are in charge of the conversations
-- the "powerful" speakers -- who use affective tags.

Language, gender and politics

The results of the tag question study can be interpreted in several different
ways. One view would be that Lakoff's general orientation is confirmed,
even though she was wrong about the facts: affective tags are used by
people who feel that they are in control of a conversation; the greater
use of tag questions overall by men in the SEU data means that the men
in those conversations felt more powerful. Another interpretation of such
data has been that women's higher proportion of affective tags, which
are used to manage the flow of conversation, means that women are saddled
with a higher proportion of "interactional shitwork."

Yet another interpretation might be that Lakoff was wrong: men are actually
more insecure about their opinions (whence men's greater usage of modal
tags), and less interested in controlling the conversational actions of
others (whence powerful men's lower usage of affective tags).

Overall, the interpretation of gender differences in language use --
and the extent to which such differences are emphasized in the first place
-- seems to have a strong political component. Certainly the more abstract
interpretations that are sometimes given to observed differences -- for
instance, the conclusion that women are more cooperative and men more
competitive in conversation -- are highly political. In evaluating such
interpretations, it is well to remember how widely they can vary.

An older set of sexist stereotypes about gender differences in communication
-- very different from Tannen's -- are expressed in Rudyard Kipling's
1911 poem The female
of the species. Kipling depicts the stereotypical man as an equivocator,
"whose timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say." Men in
conversation are therefore ready to compromise and to discuss all sides
of an issue, and tend to be diverted by humor, doubt and pity. A woman,
on the other hand, "who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her
breast / May not deal in doubt or pity -- must not swerve for fact or
jest." For a woman, "her contentions are her children," and anyone who
disagrees will be met with "unprovoked and awful charges -- even so the
she-bear fights." The conclusion, for Kipling, is that women should be
excluded from politics:

So it cames that Man, the coward, when he gathers
to conferWith his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave
a place for her.

No doubt many Edwardian men (and even some women) felt the same thrill of
recognition, in reading Kipling's poem, that many contemporary women (and
men) feel in reading Tannen or Gray. The large number of copies of Kipling's
poem on the net suggests that some contemporary men still respond this way
to it.

We should have learned since Kipling's time that this rush of feeling,
in response to the well-crafted expression of a social stereotype, is
not to be trusted. To quote from a recent article by Penelope Eckert and
Sally McConnell-Ginet:

Women's language has been said to reflect their
(our) conservatism, prestige consciousness, upward mobility, insecurity,
deference, nurturance, emotional expressivity, connectedness, sensitivity
to others, solidarity. And men's language is heard as evincing their toughness,
lack of affect, competitiveness, independence, competence, hierarchy,
control [...] When we recombine all these abstractions, we really do not
know what we have. Certainly we don't seem to find real women and men
as sums of the characteristics attributed to them.

Gender-neutral language and the problem of English pronouns

Over the past couple of decades, a great deal of gender-specific terminology
in English has been replaced by gender-neutral terms: chairperson
or chair for chairman, server for waitress or
waiter, etc. Although it rubs some older people the wrong way, most
people seem to agree that elimination of incidental gender marking is a
good thing, especially in the case of terms for jobs and social roles, since
it helps to eliminate sex-role stereotyping.

The most difficult area in English is the pronoun system. Third-person
singular pronouns are marked for gender -- he/she/it. The traditional
usage was to view the masculine pronoun as unmarked. Here is a link to
a discussion
of this problem and current alternatives for dealing with it.